Preparing for an Aging World The Case for Cross-National Research (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-14
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From page 1... ...
This increase in fertility rates contributed temporarily to younger age distributions, but the aging of the baby boom cohorts will soon accelerate population aging in these countries. The projected growth in the numbers and proportions of the world's older population poses an array of challenges to policy makers.
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From page 2... ...
Second, because population aging generally is a gradual phenomenon, its socioeconomic consequences tend to appear gradually as well, and in some cases with a fair degree of predictability. Thus if policy makers recognize and appreciate the import of the coming changes, they will have a window of opportunity in which to develop policies and programs for coping with the stresses induced by changing population age structures.
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From page 3... ...
Initiatives in Europe, the United States and Asia that integrate several salient domains of people's lives into single survey instruments have proven to be successful prototype data collection efforts. Study domains include income and wealth, labor force activity and retirement, health status and utilization of health care facilities, cognition, and intergenerational transfers.
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From page 4... ...
Studies can be repeated cross sections, singlecohort panel studies, or panel studies that continue to add new cohorts at the bottom end of the age range and are thus continually representative of the study population. If affordable, panel studies that add new cohorts are clearly best, since they not only capture the dynamics of change over time for individuals, but also continue to describe the broader population and not just a single cohort.
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From page 5... ...
that are occurring differentially throughout the world; and the growing awareness among policy makers that problems resulting from global aging pose what is arguably the most important set of economic and social challenges they will face over the next half-century. To benefit from the possibility of exploiting institutional differences to understand the effects of policy measures, data collection efforts in different countries must be harmonized in the sense that conceptually comparable information is collected, and procedures (e.g., for sampling and quality control)
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From page 6... ...
A cross-national perspective provides a broader and richer set of institutional arrangements within which to understand policy initiatives, and offers opportunities to relate variations in institutional arrangements to the distribution of attributes that determine program eligibility, benefit levels, and ultimately individual and household behaviors. Sophisticated comparative analyses can exploit differences and changes in policy rules across countries by isolating their impacts from those of other macroeconomic and social changes.
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From page 7... ...
The ability to merge data of this sort with data tailored to the analytic issues addressed by surveys clearly has major advantages. Beyond the scientific advantages, the linking of administrative and other information with survey data reduces respondent burden, a notinsignificant factor given the complexities of survey research instruments and the sometimes strong cultural reluctance to participate in survey endeavors.
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From page 8... ...
But if countries want to use current natural experiments throughout the world to improve their own adaptations to population aging, these are the five essential domains that must be addressed by international data and research. Work, Retirement, and Pensions The declining labor force participation of older persons in many parts of the world is one of the most dramatic economic trends of the past four decades.
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From page 9... ...
The incentive effects of these private defined-benefit plans are quite similar to those of public pension programs. For many developing countries that are just designing pension programs with private as well as public components, there are opportunities to learn from the trials and errors of wealthier nations.
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From page 10... ...
; whether we can explain the current low savings rate in the United States (capital gains appear to be an important part of the explanation) ; and whether the recent runup of the stock market was driven by demography (there is some evidence that it may have been, and if so, this has important consequences for the wealth position of the baby boomers when they retire)
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From page 11... ...
In industrialized countries, the most salient of these systems are associated with individual savings behavior (representing transfers over individual life cycles) , exchanges with family members, and intergenerational transfers from current workers to nonworkers through many types of social security and pension programs.
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From page 12... ...
Although population aging may or may not result in increasing proportions of elderly persons in poor health, the numbers experiencing that condition are almost certain to increase. Thus as the populations of all industrialized countries and most developing countries age, the social and economic demands on individuals, families, communities, and nations will grow, with a substantial impact on formal and informal medical and social care systems and on the financing of medical services in general.
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From page 13... ...
Questions of well-being are particularly important during major life transitions, both because such transitions provide a specific frame of reference for the assessment of well-being and because they involve significant changes in activity patterns. Proposals for the continuing assessment of well-being have been put forth for at least a half-century.
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From page 14... ...
Whether it comes as welcome or unwelcome, retirement signals significant changes in an individual's (or couple's) pattern of activity, use of time, and network of social relations.
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